I temporarily lost my hearing a few months ago. Despite the world coming through in whispers, I learned I only see the world clearly through sound. I would not call this ability synesthesia, but it would make sense, like many other clinical terms, when applied to my life. I have tended to get…
Category: Mind, Brain and Behavior
Some Perspectives on Prophecies
Naomi Michalowicz // Now direct your eyes here, gaze at this people, your own Romans. Here is Caesar, and all the offspring of Iulus destined to live under the pole of heaven. This is the man, this is him, whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of the Deified, who will…
Lonely Children in the Mirror: Isolation, Young People’s Mental Health and Literary Chronotopes.
Lonely Children in the Mirror: Isolation, Young People’s Mental Health and Literary Chronotopes. Mizuki Tsujimura’s award-winning novel, Kagami no Kojou, was published in Japan in 2017 and translated into English as Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Philip Gabriel in 2021 (Tsujimura, 2021). The novel is a fantasy adventure which begins when the protagonist, Kokoro,…
When Bad Things Happen to Good People: Living Well in the Midst of Suffering
When Bad Things Happen to Good People: Living Well in the Midst of Suffering As a pediatrician, I have encountered both the healthiest of children and the most devastating of cases. And while I expected to encounter tragedy, I could never have anticipated what it would feel like to herald death. It was late overnight,…
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus
Ethnographically Capturing the Autoimmune: Textures and Surplus My New Year resolves to avoid fitting in within academic circles that reductively evaluate and lazily quantify my professional and personal contributions. I am tired of defending: my dissertation, my philosophies, and, ultimately, myself. Mentors and elders have confessed that the purpose of academic hazing is to…
The Way of Seizures
Note: This essay contains spoilers for Avatar: The Way of Water. There’s little I love more than surprise neurology in mainstream media. One such surprise occurred recently when one of the main characters in Avatar: The Way of Water has a seizure. Seizures are the proverbial bread and butter of pediatric neurology, and while…
The Language of Smell
Naomi Michalowicz // My two-year-old daughter has two words with which to describe food: yummy and yucky. For sound, she can distinguish between “big noise” and “very quiet.” She has a significantly broader vocabulary when it comes to sight: big and small, green, blue, or red, and the capacious description that may apply to anything…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown “The Past is never dead. It’s not even past.” -William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. In the 1960s, researchers came up with “the grandmother hypothesis” to theorize on the evolutionary “purpose” of menopause. NPR ran a story on the benefits of living…
Stranger Things; or, Why ’80s Nostalgia is Good For You
Naomi Michalowicz // Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit show about kids fighting eldritch terrors in 1980s suburbia, has just concluded its fourth season. An obvious appeal of the show is its shameless indulgence in ’80s nostalgia, hitting every cliche of representing the decade—bicycles, arcades, music, quaint technology, bad hair, and of course, the full range of…